In recent times, travel writing has crossed the borderline between fiction and non-fiction, and has de-centered the prevailing canons. The accounts of travel today constitute significant documents of culture, and writers present travel experience imaginatively and construct or interpret reality from their own angle of vision. Travel writing, thus, becomes an attempt to introduce `self' to `the other', providing an opportunity to the author to explore the other culture and record his aown experiences in the context of the cultural dialogue in the `contact zine'. The paper attemots to examine the cultural exploration and dialogue in From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet by Vikram Seth and Dancing in the Cambidia, At Large in Burma by Amitav Ghose, and to map the individual abilities of the authors to move through varied experiences in terms of time and space.

Travel writing has come of age with the de-centering of canons and attempts to dislocate the borderlines of fiction and non-fiction. Accounts of travel constitute important documents of culture and the travel writer occupies a position between a historian, a journalist and a biographer as he explores the other alien culture and its past, while at the same time recording his own experiences and perceptions through the cultural dialogue of the `contact zone'. According to the travel theory, travel writers construct and interpret reality from their individual angles of vision, and travel writing is an exercise in introducing the `self' to the `other', and an attempt to build bridges that link humanity through an understanding of diverse cultures. This paper attempts to study the views of two distinguished contemporary Indian English writers—Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh— in their celebrated travelogues From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) and Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998). It `maps' the authors' individual abilities to move from experience to experience in terms of time and space, erasing the `shadow lines' between people of different cultures and lands.

It has been rightly said by St.Augustine that the world is a great book of which they who never stir from home read only a page. From time immemorial, it is `the ceaseless human urge for exploration' that has been the driving force behind all cultural travel throughout the world, and literature has always extolled this desire to travel and explore, as in the stories of Ulysses and Heradotus, Ibn Batutah and Marco Polo. Indeed the image of the journey or voyage has served as a universal metaphor for the human condition and man's passage through this world, as is exemplified in the great works of Cervantes or Swift.